The Land That Death Forgot

I’d never met a centenarian before, and I suppose it’s hackneyed to say so, but my first impression of Georg Breiðfjörð Ólafsson was that he didn’t look a day over 90.

Georg is a retired shipbuilder living in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, a fishing village on a fjord buffeted by the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

With the help of his wrinkle-free son, Ágúst Ólafur Georgsson, 63, and boyishly charming grandson, Sigurdur “Siggi” Ágústsson, 29, I’ve just made the three-hour trek north from Reykjavik to meet the patriarch in person.

Upon our arrival, these three generations smile and hug, their bond palpable.

“I’m sorry I didn’t bring you a bottle of port wine,” I say, “but Siggi only told me about your affection for it on the drive up.” Siggi translates this into loud Icelandic beside his grandfather’s ear.

Despite declining hearing, Georg refuses to wear a hearing aid. I watch a smile slowly blossom on the old man’s face, and he answers in Icelandic, his voice unwavering and forceful.

On the wall of his neatly kept bedroom hangs a key-to-the-city-style certificate signed by the mayor on Georg’s birthday last March. Ágúst tells me his dad loves this honor—not as a symbol of celebrity, but because it absolves him from paying property taxes. And who could begrudge him that?

In a country noted for its long-lived men, Georg is the oldest recorded Icelander ever in a history that dates back to 874 A.D., the year Viking chieftains settled this island at the top of the world.

Over the next hour, with Siggi translating, Georg graciously fields all my questions. I start with the obvious: Why does he think he’s lived so long?

The United States may very well be, in the memorable words of the novelist Cormac McCarthy, no country for old men. But to the surprise of laymen and researchers alike, the tiny nation of Iceland has emerged as a haven for them.

When in 2014 the World Health Organization released its most recent report on life expectancy across the globe, Iceland’s 81.2 years topped the longevity rankings for men, beating out perennial contender Japan by more than 14 months.

American men came in 37th: Their average expiration date is a dispiriting 76, a full half-decade less of life.

Iceland, despite a population roughly equaling that of St. Louis, boasts a remarkable 30 to 50 centenarians at any given time, according to Ármann Jakobsson, Ph.D., a professor of early Icelandic literature at the University of Iceland who maintains an inventory of the country’s impressively old.

Georg Ólafsson, 106, Iceland’s oldest man

ANDREW HETHERINGTON & JOÍ KJARTANS

Comb through the research on life expectancy and you’ll discover a bewildering mishmash of contributing factors. Some are controllable; others, not so much.

None of us, for instance, can select our parents, nor do we have any say about where we’re born. When it comes to longevity, national wealth matters a great deal—as Iceland itself has proved over the past 75 years.

ANDREW HETHERINGTON & JOÍ KJARTANS

“For most of its history, Iceland was a very hard country to live in,” says Óttar Guðmundsson, M.D., a psychiatrist at the National University Hospital of Iceland (known as Landspitali) and the author of nine books on the country’s history and culture.

“In the glory days of the Viking settlers, people constantly fought and killed each other. In the 13th century, we had a terrible civil war. We’ve suffered plagues, famine, and volcanic eruptions, including one in 1783 that killed off 25 percent of the population.

“Even by the 19th century, our people were desperately poor and uneducated. We had one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe. But then Iceland began to prosper during World War II, and everything started changing very rapidly.”

Today Iceland is among the richest nations per capita on the globe. Well-funded public health programs and state-of-the-art medical care have clearly contributed massively to the country’s longevity gains.

But that hardscrabble past may have helped too. Some researchers suspect that modern Icelanders may carry unusually robust “survivor genes” bequeathed to them by ancestors who were equipped to survive the country’s evolutionary crucible.

“Those who were left over,” says Dr. Guðmundsson, “were a strange brew—maybe the healthiest or the fittest of them all. Or perhaps just the most stubborn.”

Around 75 percent of men in Iceland report working out regularly.

ANDREW HETHERINGTON & JOÍ KJARTANS

Neurologist Kári Stefánsson, M.D., has found intriguing support for this survival-of-the-die-hardest theory. A self-described “100 percent pure Icelander,” Dr. Stefánsson left a full professorship at Harvard Medical School to return to his homeland and cofound the biotech company deCODE Genetics.

In one of their earliest studies, Dr. Stefánsson and his colleagues extracted DNA from the long-buried skulls of Iceland’s pioneering settlers. To their surprise, gene analysis revealed that these forebears were more similar to modern Norwegian men and Irish women than to current-day Icelanders.

“What this means,” Dr. Stefánsson says, “is that living on this desolate island for 1,100 years, suffering all sorts of hardships, has changed our people’s genomes so they’re unlike those of people whose ancestors just stayed home.”

Scrutiny of Icelandic genes could eventually lead to next-generation medicines. For example, one recently discovered gene variant, found in about one percent of living Icelanders, offers nearly total protection from Alzheimer’s disease.

“Iceland, despite a population roughly equaling that of St. Louis, boasts a remarkable 30 to 50 centenarians at any given time.”

Perhaps most fascinating of all is proof that an almost mystical “genetic asset” exists within certain Icelandic family lines—an asset that’s not yet identified but is almost certainly a single gene—that confers upon its fortunate owners a dramatically extended life span after age 67.

But genes, like wealth, are only part of the story.

“Honestly, I don’t know why I’ve lived so long,” Georg Ólafsson tells me over coffee and chocolate-coconut cookies. His life, he maintains, has been an ordinary one, typical of men of his generation.

Born in 1909, he grew up on an island in the frigid waters off Stykkishólmur. During the Great Winter of 1918, Georg remembers that the seawater froze—all the way to the mainland.

His happiest childhood memories were times spent with his brothers, picking seabird eggs and gathering down from eider ducks’ nests.

When Georg turned 17, his father bought a farm near Stykkishólmur and moved the family off the island. Georg dreamed of becoming a sea captain, an ambition his younger brother, Eyjolfur, achieved.

But Georg soon discovered that he had a very un-Viking-like propensity for seasickness. He decided to build ships, not sail them.

When I ask how he’s managed to keep his mind sharp for so long, Georg again is hard put to offer explanations. He enjoys playing chess and cards and practicing his harmonica.

Building boats had been intellectually challenging too, but he says he never went out of his way to exercise his brain.

Perhaps, I suggest, he’s a beneficiary of the recently discovered Alzheimer’s protection gene. Son Ágúst shakes his head. “Actually, they tested my father for this gene,” he says. “They found he doesn’t have it.”

Not that Georg has enjoyed immunity from other serious medical problems: He’s suffered a heart arrhythmia since childhood and lost an eye when a shard of wood pierced it during a shipbuilding accident. And then, cancer.

“My brother noticed he was getting very pale,” says Ágúst. “So he told the doctor, and the doctor found advanced colon cancer.”

“How old was Georg when he was diagnosed?” I ask.

“Still pretty young,” Ágúst says, smiling. “I think he was 98. But he recovered from it completely!”

Being a man has its advantages, but outliving women has never been one of them. This is true in Iceland too, but maybe not for much longer.

“Over the past 30 years, women’s life expectancy here has climbed four years while men’s has increased six,” he says. “Both are gaining, but men are gaining faster.” Even among centenarians, where women typically hold an overwhelming advantage, Iceland is nearing parity.

One explanation for this is smoking. “Among developed countries, probably the most important factor causing life expectancy to vary is smoking prevalence,” explains Samuel Preston, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania’s Population Studies Center.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation cites Iceland as one of the four countries in the world with the largest declines in smoking since 1980. Quitting tobacco boosts life expectancy for both sexes, of course. But only in Iceland have men managed to add more years than women have by doing so.

Drinking rates have also been traditionally low in Iceland. Prohibition in the United States is ancient history, but Iceland’s ban on booze lasted longer than those of other countries that adopted temporary prohibitions. Beer was illegal until 1989. (Russia, by contrast, uses vodka as anesthesia—for life.)

“There are still a lot of abolitionists around,” says Dr. Guðmundsson, who adds that drinking’s relatively late arrival to Icelandic culture may be a factor in its citizens’ longevity. It certainly seems a likely one in yet another chart-topping Icelandic stat: the lowest rate of liver cirrhosis in the world.

Though cirrhosis accounts for two percent of deaths worldwide, it isn’t a disease that most of us worry about. A newly published study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, has elevated its mankiller status.

The exact explanation for this is still under investigation, but the primary causes include drug and alcohol overdoses, suicides—and alcoholic cirrhosis.

Substance abuse isn’t the only reaper with a preference for male targets. Icelandic men benefit, too, from a dramatic reduction in violent mayhem, which globally continues to cull far more men than women.

“Given how peaceful Iceland has become,” Jakobsson says, “it’s hardly a surprise that men are catching up.”

National serenity on this island is more than just a qualitative notion. Iceland placed first out of 162 nations in the 2015 Global Peace Index—the same spot it’s held six out of the eight years since the Institute for Economics and Peace introduced the ranking in 2008.

Despite the rape-and-pillage notoriety of its Viking ancestors, the country has managed to solidify its reputation as the least violent place on earth.

Iceland is currently the only NATO country with no standing army, though it maintains an expeditionary peacekeeping force. Automatic and semiautomatic weapons and most handguns are illegal for citizens to own.

Even the police don’t carry guns; if they need to use one, they must seek prior approval from the National Police Commissioner. Gun licenses are allowed but require a safety course and test at a local police station. Possibly because of this, violent crime rates are low, and homicides extraordinarily so.

Iceland averages about a murder a year—not per 100,000 citizens, as homicide rates are typically measured, but for the entire country of 332,000 people. As one man told me, Iceland’s crime-thriller writers have been forced to invent more murders than have actually occurred.

For obvious reasons, men live a lot longer when they stop killing one another. But Iceland’s peace brings with it another key benefit to men: The harder it is to makes enemies, the easier it becomes to make friends.

One popular saying is that most decisions in Iceland are made not in Parliament but in the hot tub.

Public pools, and hot tubs in particular, are a central feature of the country’s culture. Anyone who has spent time soaking knows the relief that warm, swirling waters provide to knotted muscles, strained brains, and chilled bodies.

Investigators at Stanford University’s Human Performance Lab and the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine have found evidence that the benefits include more than just feel-good vibes.

Repeated heat exposure appears to reduce cardiovascular strain and increase red blood counts and plasma volume, and it may even improve performance in endurance athletes.

Hot tubs and public pools, which research says may help reduce cardiovascular strain, are inseparable from the country’s culture.

ANDREW HETHERINGTON & JOÍ KJARTANS

Decades of research documents how strong social ties—or lack thereof—profoundly affect our physical and mental health.

In a review in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, pioneering sociologist Debra Umberson, Ph.D., director of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, explains that closeness to others stimulates the release of human growth hormone, inhibits secretion of stress hormones, reduces systemic inflammation, and slows the cumulative wear and tear of bodily systems.

There’s strong evidence the flip side is also true, she says: Lack of social ties can cut life short.

Dr. Guðmundsson sees in this another key to the Icelandic male advantage. “I’ve lived and worked in Sweden and Germany and seen how old people there can isolate themselves and, in a way, just disappear,” he says.

“Nobody comes to help, and all of a sudden you find a man dead in his apartment. That would be impossible here because of the closeness of our society.”

Few nations, alas, have Iceland’s knack for fostering such lifesaving bonds. In America, says Umberson, the average woman “can list numerous friends she can turn to for support. The average man, by contrast, is much more likely to list a single confidante—his girlfriend or his spouse.”

Social isolation, she says, can take a health toll as onerous as smoking or high blood pressure.

Both negative and positive health behaviors spread rapidly through social networks. Among spouses and friends, if one is obese, the others are at an increased risk of becoming obese themselves. But it also works the other way—happy, optimistic friends can nudge sad sacks in a positive direction.

Though the Icelandic diet has changed a lot in the past half century, some of the healthiest traditional fare remains.

Freshly caught coldwater fish is both wildly popular and widely recognized as a dietary superstar. Its bounty of omega-3s and other nutrients may boost cardiovascular health, defend against Alzheimer’s, and provide many other benefits.

Additional protein staples in Iceland are lamb and beef, which derive from direct descendants of the Vikings’ livestock. Iceland’s people and Parliament have resisted attempts to bring in higher-yielding modern breeds.

In contrast to the corn-fed, antibiotic-laced, factory-farmed pig and cow cousins in most of the world, Iceland’s semiwild, free-ranging beasts meander at will into the mountains each summer, grazing on natural grasses, sedges, and whatever other odd victuals they’re meant to consume.

Fresh-caught cold water fish—rich in heart- and brain-boosting omega-3s—is a popular dietary staple in Iceland.

ANDREW HETHERINGTON & JOÍ KJARTANS

The resulting meat is leaner and arguably more nutritionally complex than the kind most Americans have grown used to.

Whatever the meat, the bread that sandwiches it is almost always whole grain rye, which is linked to lower risk of prostate cancer in men and improved lipid profiles of people with metabolic syndrome.

Iceland’s paucity of local produce is offset by imports, so fruit and vegetable intake has been increasing in the past few decades.

“We were sufficiently poor not to be able to overindulge in food,” says deCODE’s Dr. Stefánsson. And caloric restriction, he notes, has been linked to longevity.

Although fishing and farming are giving way to the sedentary toil of desk jockeys, about 75 percent of men report working out regularly. That’s a likely longevity booster in those who make it a lifelong habit.

The Icelandic Heart Association’s Reykjavík Study found that older men who stayed active since their 20s had a 25 percent lower risk of advanced prostate cancer than the least active men.

Eight times an Icelander has won the World’s Strongest Man title. Throughout the country you will find men all across the age spectrum who make time in their daily schedules to lift weights.

Case in point: Dr. Stefánsson. At 6’6” and a muscular 217 pounds, he resembles a real-life Thor. I’d heard he’s more than just a scientific celebrity in Iceland; he’s also something of a celebrated weightlifter.

“I’m no great weightlifter,” he says dismissively. “I’m 66 years of age and I have a terrible family history, so when I’m in town I go to the gym once a day to maintain my health.”

At this, he looks me over. “Okay, I can lift a little bit. I can lift more than you.”

Muscular power, from grip strength to the brute force of biceps and quads, has fast emerged as potent protection from early death.

In Sweden, scientists assessed the strength of more than a million young men and then tracked their health for 24 years. The strongest were about 20 percent less likely to die of any cause by middle age than the weakest.

U.K. researchers have found that after age 53, weak men are 3½ times more likely to die within a 13-year period than their stronger peers.

Outside the nursing home windows, the late autumn light is fading fast. Georg, for his part, shows no signs of tiring; the same, unfortunately, cannot be said of his jet-lagged interviewer.

ANDREW HETHERINGTON & JOÍ KJARTANS

I wrap up our chat by asking whether he thinks the combination of diet, exercise, and stress management could have influenced his longevity.

When Siggi has explained what I’m after, Georg looks bemused. “My favorite food was leg of lamb, which we hung in the smokehouse and then boiled for Christmas dinner,” he says.

But most of his diet wasn’t fancy. The vast majority of his calories came from animal fats and protein: fish, lamb, beef, and dairy. He also ate wild waterfowl, mostly puffins, which used to be common here but have migrated north with climate change.

“Everybody around me was optimistic, so I learned to become this way myself”

Until middle age, the only plants he consumed regularly were potatoes and other root vegetables and, of course, rye bread.

His family supplemented this with such delicacies as the blubber of minke whales, ram’s testicles “soured” to preserve them, and dried cod so heavily salted that it had to be soaked for days to render it edible.

“My parents told me they often went hungry when they were young,” Georg says. “My brothers and I never did.”

Yet food in those days had to be caught, foraged, or grown. You had to spend calories to eat calories.

Georg the shipbuilder never learned to swim, nor did he play sports or engage in formal exercise. His life on the island, then on the farm, and finally in a shipyard was exercise enough.

Who needs to pump iron when your job demands nonstop hours on your feet steaming huge wooden planks to make them pliable, hauling them on your back, and then sledgehammering them into place? Strength, to be sure, is a matter of mind as well as muscle.

Perhaps the toughest thing about growing old is the accrual of losses. Georg’s wife died in 1984, and he’s outlived all his friends from youth.

“It’s not fun that people are dying all around me,” he says. “But that’s life. I try to just accept it. My motto is to take life as it comes.”

Did such a resilient outlook stand out among his peers?

“I don’t think so,” Georg says. “All the people around me were generally happy too, and they had this optimistic mentality.”

If anything, he says, he was hardly the sunniest of his peers. “Everybody around me was optimistic, so I learned to become this way myself,” he says.

When it’s time to leave, I gingerly offer a handshake. Georg’s grip crushes my fingers like twigs. Siggi laughs.

“Look at those hands!” the proud grandson boasts. “Georg’s fingers are twice as thick as ours! He doesn’t know his own strength. That’s what a life of hammering will do for you.”

On my final night in Iceland, in a village on the rugged southwest coast, a fisherman recommends a place for supper.

In the dining room, a stereo plays country music, sung in Icelandic. I order a pint of Gull Lager, lobster soup, and halibut steak, which the waitress says was caught today. This meal, like all the others I’ve had here, is thoroughly enjoyable.

The portion size may not be what I’ve grown accustomed to back home. Then again, neither is the feeling of contentment, not painful engorgement, that sets in when I’m done.

It dawns on me how uncharacteristically de-stressed and joyful I am. Just then a chorus of male voices arises from another room. When I ask the waitress about it, she smiles and pulls back a curtain.

In an adjoining banquet hall, a club of local men, from early middle age to retirement years, stand at two long tables, singing a hymn before enjoying a communal dinner.

They seem, to a man, glad to be alive. That’s a sentiment, I confess, that sometimes proves elusive to me back home.

Between stress, worry, and boredom with the grind, I wonder if the typical U.S. life span is already overly generous. I have come to Iceland to discover how men here live longer. Perhaps I know now why they want to.

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